Linus Torvalds talk with Aalto University students (10/23/2012)

Greetings, Habr!

Once I stumbled on YouTube with this video with Linus Torvalds and looked at it with great pleasure, I learned a lot of interesting things for myself and to my surprise I found out that it went unnoticed at Habré, especially considering that his previous communication with many students from this university well known because of the sudden publicity of nVidia by Linus. I don’t know, maybe I’ve been looking badly, but, in any case, the conversation is conducted in English and lasts more than an hour and maybe one of you doesn’t speak it well, so I decided to translate it to you in the Russian text and publish on Habré. So, those who want to find out what Linus is doing in Linux now, how he struggles with procrastination, what he thinks about Linux on mobile devices, what is more important for him in Linux, usability or security, how he treats hardware manufacturers, on what he earns as it is resting, whether its children program and much, much more - welcome under the cat!

And before starting, a small “disclaimer”: not a single native speaker of English took part in the conversation, moreover, most people speak it with a terrible accent, abundantly littering and distorting speech, as well as the sound engineer at the beginning of the conversation I woke up and did not align the microphone level for the hall, so at the beginning, some of the questions are simply not audible, but from the answers you can understand what is at stake and the whole point is in the answers. I hope for your understanding. And yes, some comments and explanations from me in the text flow in brackets. Well, enjoy reading!
')

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Linus Torvalds talks to Aalto University students
Espoo, Finland, October 23, 2012
Moderator: Professor Marco Turpeinen

Professor:
First of all, it is a great pleasure that you returned to Aalto University.

Linus:
Thank.

Professor:
And not much time has passed since you were here, I suppose it was at the beginning of summer.

Linus:
Quick question. Who was here in June? (part of the hall raises hands) Ok, so there is fresh blood in the audience. Good.

Professor:
And I have another question, how many Aalto students are there? (they raise their hands in the hall) Excellent, because it was one of Linus's requests. He wanted to talk to Aalto students. I'm glad you're here. If I go to YouTube now and look for Aalto University, your record will pop up high enough. (Linus makes a facepalm, the hall laughs) Just to warn you ...

Linus:
No more fingers this time. (laughs with the audience)

Professor:
This time we also record everything and also everything goes on the air. Let's hope and keep your fingers crossed (laugh) that it will be equally fun and exciting event. One more thing. A few words to say. We are in the Open House of Innovations, therefore, there are some rules of the House and may also be innovations. We would like you to participate. There are several options for how you can participate and one of them is called Screen.IO, which is a start-up of people who work in this building from the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology. Through Screen.IO everyone here can take part, our address is screen.io/linus, so if you have anything that the browser works on, use it. Right now you can log in, there is a certain first question (about your favorite platform) , up there (looking at the screen behind your back) if you enter, so guys answer it. This is one way. We have a very aesthetic way for you to occupy you. Screen.IO is the first. We also reserved a hashtag, if someone tweets, please use #linuseit as a hashtag for this event. Then, the third way - we have another innovation from Aalto University students, this is something called CatchBox. Whoever wants to ask a question here, we will give you a microphone. So this is a microphone and don't worry, it's pretty soft. So no injuries yet. In any case, this is a microphone that we will constantly transmit, you can send it back to us. I think he will be with us or Linus. (Linus swings) I guess there are no questions there yet. We will throw it to you when you have questions. In any case, this is a small piece of technology that was developed here at Aalto University, which we use today. I suppose one of the great things about being a moderator is that I have the opportunity to ask questions first and here is one of the things that worries me, of those that I can remember, having read the book “Just for fun” about 10 years ago, which was about you and about what you did and what motivations were behind it. So, 10 years have passed, can you tell us a little, first, about what you are doing for Linux now and what makes you continue, what motivates you?

Linus:
These days, what I'm doing in Linux is reading mail. And I respond to mail, apply patches, but more often just merge code from other developers. I did not code it myself for several years. I'm still writing code, but the code I'm writing is simply fixing stupid mistakes that others make. So most of the time, my input to the code is one-liners and two-liners. And what I'm really doing is just merge code from thousands of actual developers and I try to make it easy to add code to the kernel, being available and going to meet every day, so people don't have to wait for me as a technical manager. And this is how we, I mean ... on average over the last year, I collected statistics, every day we make an average of about 170 sets of changes. We do about thirty merdzhey, well, most of them are made by me, every day, on average over the last year. Changes 15,000 lines of code. For comparison, when I started and made the first release of the Linux kernel, the entire kernel consisted of 10,000 lines of code. Now we make changes to 15,000 lines of code every day. And as a result of this, the kernel contains over 60 million lines of code and 40 thousand files. So I can act as a manager, but as a technical manager of the entire project, creating very little code. The coding that I do is small projects, my home projects, and as for the kernel - I'm just a boring manager. Was there another question?

Professor:
What motivates you to continue to do this, maybe those home projects?

Linus:
No, home projects are just fun, although they are side projects. What motivates me is, of course, that I started as a true programmer, writing code on my own and it is still fun and I still do it in small projects, but it turns out that even though I am a geek, I really enjoy social interactions I like swearing at people when they make mistakes, I like the exchange of opinions, I like the arguments, it motivates me to be part of a very sociable community. We have many engineers with big ego and it is very exciting to be involved in this. We have technical discussions and not all of them pass with swearing. It gives a taste of life.

Professor:
So it’s all about communities, people?

Linus:
This community, communication, yes.

Professor:
Good. (turns to colleagues) Can we now show the results of warming up? It was about the favorite platform. (look at the slide, which shows a graph of the distribution of favorite platforms among students)


(Distribution: Linux - 68%, Windows - 19%, OS X / iOS - 10%, The rest - 3%. It would be better to show which platform students go to Screen.IO)

Professor:
OK.

Linus:
Well, this is a big surprise. I am sure that this is partly an independent choice. (professor laughs)

Professor:
In any case, there are a lot of fans around, it's good. On the other hand, this will be my second question and it looks like the one that came from the audience, so let's move on. We are now in Finland and Linux, as an operating system, in the center of a very interesting technological battle between different mobile platforms ...

Linus:
Oh, is this a Nokia question?

Professor:
This is a Nokia question, exactly.

Linus:
Jesus ... (makes feyspalm, laughter in the hall)

Professor:
I would not ask it this way, but someone from the audience asked it this way (the question on the slide: “Microsoft and Nokia alliance: is Mr. full?”) , But in any case, I think this question is a little wider than what Nokia and Microsoft are doing. I think, for my part, the question would be: how important do you see the role of the operating system, and why do you think that Linux now has all the necessary ingredients for this? I suppose you think that Linux-based systems will be the ones who win the mobile battle.



Linus:
Honestly, I'm not going to answer the Nokia question. There is no good for me. It doesn't matter, just don't ask. It was very interesting to see Linux on phones for several reasons. One of which was purely technical - low energy consumption opportunities often used by people with telephones. Therefore, for the past few years, we have struggled to have power management in the core, which was promoted to a greater extent by laptops. But the phones also make up a huge part. Another reason that gives me pleasure is how popular Linux is in phones, many thanks to Android, it also shows that Linux is actually very advanced in terms of rich user interfaces with which “normal people” interact. I mean, before Android, there were people trying to make Linux on phones more or less successful, most of them less, but people felt that user interfaces as real consumer products are not what Linux was famous for. And Android has changed the situation and the understanding of this was very important, and many companies have attended to this account. Even if you don’t use Android, and many people use Android, I think it will make Linux more acceptable in certain areas, such as a consumer interface and this is interesting, I think this is a very important area.

Professor:
Now, I think, time for a question from the audience. Who wants to start? ... (silence) ... Wow! Come on, please ...

(vague question from the audience)

Linus:
I do not even know. When I studied at the University of Helsinki in the early years I did more mathematics than computer science. And I do not recall the direct application of any of the sections of mathematics (laughter in the hall) ... But! I took a lot of very theoretical courses, I mean a set of theories, from algebra to concepts and not so much numerical material. Perhaps, without ever using these things directly, I think a thinking model is something that really matters. And for example, another project, not as well known as Linux, in which I participated is Git. I think that having a mathematical mind and model thinking, a set of theory and the creation of such things is very important for a programmer, even if you are not using mathematics directly. I really like mathematics, in fact the reason why I studied computer science as a major subject at the university was more related to the fact that I felt that I could get a job related to computer science rather than to mathematics, but mathematics was, in fact, , my main interest. And I think this is a rewarding experience, so those people who clap because they hate math are wrong.

Professor:
Good. Next question (silence)

Linus:
Wow You are much worse than students at the University of Helsinki. (laughter)

Professor:
This is not good. This is not good.

(vague question from the audience)

Linus:
I have three daughters. One will soon be 16. And none of them show any interest in programming. It is sad. But it is so. They are more interested in Facebook and things like this. I do not expect any of them to be an engineer. I tried to interest them, but the problem is that I am a bad teacher. I am very frustrated and nervous if they do not instantly understand what I am trying to tell them, and this may scare my children more than it awakens the desire to learn how to program. One day, I just realized that I needed to stop even trying.

Professor:
Any other questions?

(vague question from the audience)

Linus:
What mentally resembles programming ... I really don't know. I suppose this is more like architecture or building a bridge or designing, not so much a scientific approach in general. But it's hard for me to even say. I would prefer to answer your second question, because I really can't answer this. The most important thing you have to keep in mind when building something new is that you should not think that you are going to change the world by doing something huge and big and completely different in contrast to what was earlier. It's nice to think that someone has one great idea and we will apply this idea to make the world better, but this is not how the world actually works. I participated in many projects, but they all began with a very boring rule - to solve a specific problem that I have. Some of them did not progress anywhere, but those that were successful ... when I solved my problem, someone else came and said, "Hey, it almost solves my problem too," and they grew out of what they started out as small, but the roots and bases were good enough for them to grow. But don't try to aim at the moon. I mean, I didn’t start Linux thinking that I’ll grab the world (rubs my hands) , but we’re almost there, really? (laughter)

Professor:
I have one question here. Open Source for you is the main way to get good programs, or do you think that Open Source is such an idea, well, in a broader sense?

Linus:
For me personally, the great advantage of Open Source is that it is much more fun, it is much more interesting to work together with other people and be able to work with anyone. I did programs with closed source code, I worked for a company that made software and I also did proprietary software. And I really liked it. But. Just doing it in an open community and allowing everyone to get involved when it really works is so much fun. This is a complete social interaction, it is a completely different point of view. The fact is that in a company you usually have a vision of where you are going. It's boring! It is much more interesting to have a project like Linux, where you do not have a vision number 1, it’s like if everyone has their own vision. There are some overlaps of visions, but also complete and non-overlapping ideas. One of the strengths of Linux is that you have people who make phones, but there are also people who make supercomputers. And trying to balance all this is a great pleasure. Therefore, from my personal point of view, the development in Open Source is much more interesting. There are also many other benefits. I think that from a conceptual point of view, the scientific method is also very important. And in order to achieve real progress on complex problems, a lot of people need to work together and build their work on each other’s work. I will quote Newton. This is my favorite quote: "If I saw farther than others, it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants." And he talked about physics and science, but I think that absolutely the same develops technology into the most real technological innovation. It's not about a great new idea, it's about the top of gradually proven existing technologies and only after years and decades do you get from what was a clumsy car like what we see today. And once again, Open Source is a type of scientific model for computer science. And I think this is important. Further, there is a point of view of free software, which considers that Open Source is important only for moral reasons and I find it an intriguing and interesting point of view, even if I usually disagree with it. But it’s interesting how many different people make Open Source for so many different reasons, both technical and personal. And I think this is a real power.

(vague question from the audience)

Linus:
I have to say that each individual part is rather slow, sometimes painful, so you want to get much faster progress and something happens that you just make small incremental improvements in any single part and the “explosive growth” of Linux doesn't really belong to a single kernel areas, as a rule. The developers are very fast because 9,000 people work there on different parts of the kernel. And it’s as if you looked at a small detail - things can take years before they mature, but when you look at everything, it turns out that many things change every week, so you have both slow progress and rapid global progress on another level. For example, I was very worried about all the work on power management that we did, it took us years. And this is a fairly common case when something crosses borders, like power management, especially for phones, but this also applies to laptops. You need to have a scheduler, I / O is very important for power management, all drivers ... and we support thousands of different devices, they should all get the power management right. The PCI layer has to get it right, there are a lot of different components there and it took a lot of time and made you nervous a lot. Therefore, sometimes you have really slow things, and then people say: “Oh, you designed this thing so quickly!”. It is true, in a sense, in another sense - we are no faster than anyone else.

(vague question from the audience about Android and Google)

Linus:
The question was, do I think there is space for a commercial or non-commercial operating system like Android, but not Android? I have to say that it’s really difficult to develop a whole distribution, it’s tons of work. Even if I completely love the grassroots efforts of Open Source and we would have had most of the work on the core done by singles who just get high on technology, the fact that we would need the companies involved would be very important because it turns into a specially produced product. I do not know what it is, but you probably will need the direction that happens with companies. And I think it was one of the successes ... Linux was one of the first Open Source projects that was very open for commercial use. I think it’s very difficult to do something like Android without the support of the company, without seeing who has a specific goal in mind. I truly believe that commerce, although some people think it is bad, helps set the course, in many ways. I'm not saying that it’s impossible to build a community around an Android alternative, I’m just saying that it’s hard.

Professor:
One question from the stream. What do you think of the upcoming open iron movement? Regarding Linux.

Linus:
I do not know about the approach. People have been trying to create open iron for a long time. There were a lot of projects trying to do open iron. And ... Open iron is hard. Because everyone can be involved in software, all you need is a computer and development environment. And you have no other costs.Open iron ... of course, you can create a design in this way, if you create a new processor or graphics chip or something else, but in the end someone needs to create a piece of iron. Speaking of 3D printing, which is obviously approaching by leaps and bounds. But this is still not something you can do as a lonely or medium company. What I find more interesting is not necessarily open iron, but very cheap iron. Therefore, all these projects, if you consider something like an open iron Raspberry Pi, I find very interesting, because I think that when iron is very cheap and widely available, it changes the economy of things. But open iron, in the sense that it has an open design, seems still somewhere far away.

(a question from the audience in very broken English, something about the kernel development methodology)

Professor:
Those.methodology of how you do merdzhi? How do you manage this?

Linus:
I am a huge believer in the same-minded and trusting people. Therefore, most of the code I get is not because I look at each piece of code, because in fact there is no way I could do this, returning, 15,000 lines of code change every day. If I even tried to just view the code, I would be crazy. What is actually happening ... Over the years I have created a network of people whom I can trust, this is how people usually work. You have close friends and you know how they work. And after a while, you look at the code they generate or the code they take and you say, "Hey, I trust him, he is an expert in this field." To an extent in many cases. I have a very good overview of the current state, but in many areas I am by no means an expert, so peoplewhich I trust is often better than me in this code. Therefore, I would be a fool trying to use micromanagement in their relationship and trying to look at the code and plunging into checking what they did. It would waste my time and waste their time too. It is sad. And this is why I am known as a not very pleasant and swearing type with many people. I never delve when everything goes smoothly.( )When someone makes a mistake and a code is accepted, which in fact should not be accepted, then I must enter. And people start writing me a mail and saying: “You broke the core and the latest release no longer works.” And then I start to swear at people and say: “What the hell? I trusted you! You ... You obviously shouldn't have done that with me. ” Quite often, I dive into the problem later, look at this code and say: “Jesus! This is ugly, horrible code. How could you even accept that? ” And this is an understanding that I often have and which, in most cases, is negative, which may not be very good sometimes. I mean, what people do ... some people actually think I'm a grumpy old man. I realize that if you only see my flame and my swearing, and not private discussions, when things are going well, you thinkthat i hate everyone. And there are days when it's almost true. But, I still check the code from people that I do not trust. But I have the closest 10-15 developers when they send me the code, I say: "I trust you, I'm not going to waste my time and yours, trying to guess your decision."

Question from the audience:
I actually had a question about hardware and vendors. What is the impact of Linux kernel development today and what is the responsibility, how good is Linux support?

Linus:
There are so many vendors of iron, some excellent, some not so excellent. In this conversation, I have to concentrate on the good ones, right? (laughter)Because there are vendors who really do a good job. The best example is probably Intel. This is a big vendor of iron. They do not only processors, they do network equipment too, both wired and wireless, they do many different things. And they were very active in not only sending drivers and documentation, but also several main kernel maintainers actually working for Intel. Intel, in fact, said: "Hey, you support this area, let us pay you to support it for us." And this is an example of an iron vendor who did everything quite correctly. It took them some time. When I was in Silicon Valley, in fact, maybe the first year I had a conversation with Intel about this,Intel engineers were not allowed to participate in discussions on the Linux kernel mailing list using intel.com. There were hard and fast rules inside Intel that said “no, you should never tell anyone what you are working with at Intel, because if you do something bad, we don’t want our name to be tainted with your actions.” But years later, they were the best of the best vendors of iron. There is a large range of really bad vendors, which I will not mention again.There is a large range of really bad vendors, which I will not mention again.There is a large range of really bad vendors, which I will not mention again.( )What is most painful is the vendors who realized that Linux is really important for them to participate in their piece of hardware and they force engineers to work on writing a driver, say, for a network card. And they write the driver completely on their own, not to mention this to anyone around and then they send the driver to us. In particular, Greg, who is the main maintainer of the driver tree. Most of their drivers are terrible. They are really nasty. Even if they work, the quality of the code is so bad that no one can actually read it. And all this was done inside the company that makes the iron, so no one else has the documentation. You have bad code, maybe it works, maybe not, if something breaks, no one can fix it. This is the case when a company tries to do a good thing, but becausethat they never interacted with the community, except as “here you are! Take this driver! ”, it ends very painfully for everyone. And then people like Greg ... he's a saint! I don’t understand how he ... because he works with a lot of such companies that are really nice and nice people, and trying to convince these iron producers: “Please, we understand what you are trying to do as best, but it sucks.”(laughter) And it may take years to get two-way communication and real community interaction. Everything is getting better. In a sense, it becomes much better than here before - almost no support from any iron manufacturer. And these days, many manufacturers often provide us with drivers even before they release iron. Everything is much nicer now. But it was a great learning experience from both sides.

Professor:
Further more about desktops and window managers, etc. The first question was - what do you think, where are Linux desktops now, regarding current distributions, what is happening now? And there was also a specific question - what do you use yourself?

Linus:
Obviously, this question should have been asked. Because I know how I don’t like some things that desktop people do. I must say, now everything is much better than it was a year ago. I actually went back to using Gnome 3 and I don’t like some of the things they did. But they fix problems, it becomes less painful. They now have extensions that are still too hard to find, but with extensions you can make your desktop look almost as good as it looked 2 years ago. (laughter)There is some irritation in my words, because I think that a desktop that has become good enough on Linux has degraded over the course of several years. And it was very disappointing, because The desktop has always been the component that I personally use, which I personally care about the most. And that was the original goal for Linux. We were very successful in phones, servers and much else where, but, obviously, the desktop is very hard not to break. And over time it became more difficult than easier.

Professor:
Well, I'll take one question from here and then continue. Returning to the mobile Linux, it certainly concerns not only Android, there are a lot of different things, of those that emerge from memory is Maemo, MeeGo. People ask about Jolla, are you following this company?

Linus:
MeeGo, is this a resurrected company? In fact, I do not follow them. I hope that they will be successful and they will have a plan B. Maybe Jolla will be able to implement this plan B. This is interesting, in the sense that it is obvious that Android dominates in this space. But there are companies working MeeGo, working Tizen ... Asia, in particular, and Korea, noticed that before they were only producers of iron and, partly thanks to Linux, some of these companies that created hardware for software that other people wrote, now they can say: “Hey, we can actually control our fate and write our own software based on Linux”. And they are also involved. And this is one of the nice things about Open Source that allows all these different parts of the ecosystem to realize that, “hey, I can participate too”. So,I was in Korea about two weeks ago, I talked to people from Samsung and LG, and it looks like they were also very interested. They want ... They are a little nervous because of Android, because they are not Google. They want, maybe, to do their own operating system, simply because they want control. Therefore, a lot of things are happening and maybe Jolla will be a separate Nokia 2, they will reconsider their approaches. (shrugs)

Professor:
Perhaps there are some people from Nokia in the audience too ... By the way, Sailfish is the name of the distribution on which Jolla works.

Linus:
Clear.But is it based on MeeGo?

Prof:
This is MeeGo, but they just renamed their own version.

Question from the audience:
I want to ask you the next question, will Grsecurity get to the core? This is the first question. The second question is how do you prioritize between security fixes and usability fixes? And third, you just mentioned that desktop systems are important to you, do you think about accepting kernel patches, such as from pf sources that make Linux I / O work faster? That is all I wanted to ask.

Linus:
These are three different questions. Grsecurity and security patches. Much of the Grsecurity has, in fact, already been done at the core. Much of what has already been done in the core has analogues. Safesky sometimes a little black and white. And by that I mean crazy. The security men think that any problem is either a security problem, or there is nothing to think about. And this is wrong. Most secure systems are systems that no one wants to use, because it is a pain in the ass. And many security guards seem to want to see their system in exactly this way, because it is “truly safe.” Therefore, my point of view is that I do not want to make a big difference between security patches and other patches. This is not only about security, by the way. Many people seem to think that performance problems are different from accuracy problems.And again, I disagree. Performance problems are real problems, as are precision problems. I do not want to distinguish performance patches from patches that fix some problems with accuracy. And I do not want to distinguish them from things related to security. A good system is a balanced system. Security is part of it, but security plays no bigger role than anything else. Security is important, but that is not the question. And many security men, they are just blind and they are too one-dimensional. Sometimes they annoy me, sometimes I call them bad names, because some of these people are really ... dumb assholes.which fix any problems with accuracy. And I do not want to distinguish them from things related to security. A good system is a balanced system. Security is part of it, but security plays no bigger role than anything else. Security is important, but that is not the question. And many security men, they are just blind and they are too one-dimensional. Sometimes they annoy me, sometimes I call them bad names, because some of these people are really ... dumb assholes.which fix any problems with accuracy. And I do not want to distinguish them from things related to security. A good system is a balanced system. Security is part of it, but security plays no bigger role than anything else. Security is important, but that is not the question. And many security men, they are just blind and they are too one-dimensional. Sometimes they annoy me, sometimes I call them bad names, because some of these people are really ... dumb assholes.Sometimes they annoy me, sometimes I call them bad names, because some of these people are really ... dumb assholes.Sometimes they annoy me, sometimes I call them bad names, because some of these people are really ... dumb assholes. True.They are very smart people, but they do not understand. Grsecurity contains many good patches, they have a few patches that basically sound like this: “Hey, we can break compatibility because we want to make some things safer. No matter, no one wants to use the end result anyway. ” What was the second question?

Question from the audience: The
question was about pf-sources and input / output scheduler. This works well for services, but are there any advantages to desktop systems?

Linus:
We have many situations where ... and this is one of the same problems where a particular niche wants to create patches for the kernel that work very well for this small area. And even when this small area is a desktop, it turns into something I don’t want to do. For example, some scheduler patches. Some of them work really well on dual- and four-processor machines and after this point they no longer scale. And if all that bothers you is only two-processor and four-processor machines, you say, “Hey, this code works much better for me, why don't you take it?” And I say this: “I'm sorry, but one of the principles of Linux is that you should be able to balance all these different areas. " And we, in general, can do it. So, for example, when we added SMP support,and SGI created patches to support their 4,000-processor monster machines, the original patches were completely unsuitable for anyone else. There were hacks that worked very well on their large machines, but they were not what we could use on small machines. And I basically told them: “I will not take it! In order for you to return your work, you must write in such a way that your patches work for anyone. ” And they did it. And the bottom line is that, in fact, they made the end result much better. Much better for us, but it turned out that they did even better for the people of SGI. They cleaned out many of the assumptions they made. Some of the projects you mentioned seem to also have these blind men, where they say: “We only care about our little world. It doesn't matter to usthat we do things that work worse for others. ” And if you have such an approach, then you should not be surprised that I am not interested in the patches that you send me. People should be able to balance things, sometimes you can do this with the help of settings, but I prefer code that just works, works well on small machines and on large machines. And this is possible, but it takes a lot more effort.but it takes a lot more effort.but it takes a lot more effort.

Question from the audience:
It has already been said that Android is breaking Linux’s barriers for ordinary users, so what do you think of the work of Valve with nVidia and Intel in improving Open Source drivers in order to release the Steam gaming platform on Linux? Is this the year Linux Desktop is finally coming?

Linus:
Well, if Valve is really, that is, I mean not “if”, but “when”, when Valve really releases its client for Linux, this in many ways will only help desktop Linux, because this area is small, but rather a vowel group people who care about their games, and Linux is not very strong about games. I was not personally directly connected to the Valve group, but I talked to those kernel developers who were there. And they were very impressed with the design people. And it looks like it was mutual. They on both sides, in fact, enjoyed working together with each other. People from the Linux kernel, and not only from the kernel, from the OpenGL user space stack, were happy to see high-performance 3D graphics in real-world conditions and to be able to also watch the sources that Valve uses for their game engine.We could say: “Oh, you really don't care about speed in this case, you care about speed in that case.”, Which helped on the side of OpenGL and the kernel. The same thing works in the opposite direction when people from Valve were really happy talking to people with Open Source, because they could say, “Oh, that’s why it will never be fast, because you are doing all these crazy things.” . In this way, people communicated and were happy from bilateral interaction. And this, apparently, means that we will have good gaming on Linux in the not too distant future.because they could say, "Oh, that is why it will never be fast, because you do all these crazy things." In this way, people communicated and were happy from bilateral interaction. And this, apparently, means that we will have good gaming on Linux in the not too distant future.because they could say, "Oh, that is why it will never be fast, because you do all these crazy things." In this way, people communicated and were happy from bilateral interaction. And this, apparently, means that we will have good gaming on Linux in the not too distant future.

Question from the audience:
You say that a lot of things have already been done. How do you handle procrastination? How do you avoid watching kitty videos all day?

Linus:
I really don't have such a problem, well, I make up the procedure. The reason I don’t watch cat videos every day is because I don’t find them as interesting as the technical letters I receive. So I have no problem with procrastination, simply because I truly believe that my work is very, very interesting. And when I wake up in the morning ... My office is over the garage, I have to walk up the stairs, about 50 meters, about ... In order not to do this behind the bed, I have a tablet. So when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I usually do is use a tablet to check incoming mail. But still, I need to work in my office to understand what is happening. This is one of the reasons why I have no problems with procrastination. Then, in other areas, I'm not so good, for example,I do not make slides, I do not make speeches. If I was forced to make a report, I inevitably delay with this until 5 minutes before the report and then I realize that I no longer have time to make the slides. Because I just can't bring myself to be interested. It depends ... The way to fight procrastination is to find something that you just adore doing and therefore go and do.

Professor:
A slightly related question, it was one of the earliest questions, but do you like cats?

Linus:
We have ... I always had, well, not always, most of my life I had a cat. We still have another cat. We also have a dog, a snake, a few gerbils, hamsters, a rabbit, a fish, which I just despise. (laughter) In our family, at different times, we had almost any animals that you can imagine. My favorites are cats and dogs. But not the video. The whole point of pets is, of course, love, in the case of dogs, and I do not know what is the case with cats.

Professor:
We will return to that question - how much do you work during the day? And there was another one - have you ever played Angry Birds on Linux?

Linus:
I played Angry Birds. (Professor giggles) Basically, I played Angry Birds when I waited for the kids to pick them up from the gym or something. This is a cool program, when you need to kill 15 minutes, because gymnastics is delayed and you play Angry Birds on your phone. What was the first question?

Professor:
How many ... do you count the hours? How many hours do you work?

Linus:
I do not count the clock.

Professor:
You just don't count the clock.

Linus:
I, in fact, can do most of my work even while on a trip. So, while I have Wi-Fi and my laptop, I obviously can read the mail, making great painful merdzhi. This is inconvenient during the trip due to the small keyboard, poor Internet connection, insufficient processor power to compile a kernel like this. Therefore, I try not to make a window for the Merci during the trip, although, in fact, it happened with the previous window for the Merci. Today, for example, when I woke up, I try to stretch it all day, so I did 3 or 4 merdzh this morning when I return, well, tonight I probably won’t do merdzhi, but I can I can do them at the airport tomorrow morning when I leave, in case I find free Wi-Fi at Helsinki Airport.

Professor:
They have it.

Linus:
Right, they have it, yes. Good.

Professor:
Maybe we will return a little to the technical side of these answers. There was a question about increasing the complexity of the Linux kernel. What is your opinion on this?

Linus:
This is a huge problem. Especially certain areas become so complex that we have only a few people who really understand them. VM is now the bad site, in which we have certain areas where only a handful of people really know the code, enough to evaluate the patches. The good news is that when you are such a compact team, there are not many patches. This is not an area where you have hundreds of patches per day. You may have hundreds of patches within one release. Therefore, it is still a controlled thing. A bit more fragile than I would like. But there are no areas that would be so complex that no one would dare to touch them anymore. We were able to avoid this problem, but some areas are so esoteric that there are only a few peoplewho are competent in them.

Question from the audience:
Do you always wear these oval glasses? (laughter)

Linus, smiling broadly:
Um, no ... That is not a question ... I don’t think I’ve ever received such a question before. In fact, for almost 10 years I don’t wear glasses at all, I have LASIK, so (removes glasses) , I can see you guys, even without these glasses. Before LASIK, my eyesight was so bad that I could not recognize my children in the swimming pool, and this is a little embarrassing if you start to miss the wrong child. (laughter) Therefore, I wear any glasses that my wife chooses. (laughter in the hall)

Professor:
Another, say, family-related question, why don't you lead torvalds-family.blogspot.fi anymore?

Linus:
Have not blogs on blogspot.fi been blocked?

Professor:
I dont know.

Linus:
I tried to blog, I did it for a few months, maybe. I reached the point where it became embarrassing to write about what I was doing. Somewhere last year, I use Google+. And if I see something really strange, I can flick it and put it on Google+, or I post a few programming questions, actually, I post a few sermons, because that's what I do. But I really am not so interested in all this blogging.

Professor:
Another question, before we return, is about blunders and any examples of where you think it was miscalculated or that you would like to share with the audience on which you learned.

Linus:
On the technical side, there have been many cases where I made the wrong decision. But this, as a rule, was not a failure, it was: “Ok, I made the wrong decision.” While I am ready to admit it, roll it back and do it right, who cares, I mean, we went in the wrong direction that time, we had it. I would like to be a nicer guy, certainly I would like to curse people less and encourage them to grow a little more, instead of saying that they are idiots. Sorry, I tried, in me it is not, I break down at times. I like the fact that we have quite different personalities in the core and many of them are strong personalities, where strong does not necessarily mean good. But ... we have people who specialize in leading new people through the process, because they really like to accompany,I've never been like this. Maybe this is a failure.(shrugs)

Professor:
There was a question ... (pointing to the hall) Do you want to try to throw it?

Linus:
Where?

Professor, in a whisper:
Taaam ...

Linus:
Oh, I won't do it ... try to catch ... (throws the box)

Professor:
Good throw.

Linus:
Close enough.

A question from the audience in very, very broken English:
And so, I thought to ask about your vision of Systemd, we know that it does a lot of things, like isolation, launching services, but there is also criticism of how it breaks the unix philosophy in terms of good performance of long tasks, in terms of programs interacting with each other, do you have an opinion on this?

Linus:
I think Systemd ...

Professor:
Maybe you should repeat the question?

Linus:
OK.The question was about my opinion about Systemd and how some people think that it breaks the unix philosophy and that it is just different. I don’t know how many people here care that Systemd is such a replacement for the traditional Init model. And she, in general, is trying to take on many other things in the startup process. I really like a lot of what Systemd does. Personally, my biggest problem with Systemd is that many people involved seem to think that change is good in itself. I saw Lennart Pottering (developed by Systemd)For example, he said that something was done badly, because it was something that was done for 30 years and all this is bad by definition. That doesn't make any sense to me, because I think that if it worked for 30 years, it definitely does something right. This is my point of view. While some people from the Systemd team seem to have strictly opposite desires, saying that if it worked this way for 30 years, then it's time to change that. And this kind of mindset makes me very nervous, it seems that sometimes they make changes for the sake of change and they don’t worry much about what people are used to and adapted to ... This is probably the reason why Systemd generates so many negative reviews because it knocks people out of feeling comfort and feels good about this. And at the same time, I think a lot,what she does is interesting. So I'm a little nervous about the development model and the desire to break things, which I think is a huge mistake, but I also think that it shows many perspectives.

Professor:
Good. Thank.There is a question, and then there.

A question from the audience in very broken Indo-English:
Hey.Personal question. How exactly did you feel when you won the Millennium Technology Prize and, if you can ask ... what did you do with the money? (laughter in the audience)

Linus:
It's hard to explain how you feel when you ... This is certainly a very cool thing - to get a reward for anything. This recognition and the Millennium Prize is a lot of money, in fact. So what I did with the money - I paid taxes. (laughter)What else, right now, we have no special plans for premium money, I can not really worry about money, but not caring about money also means dislike to worry about money. I have the necessary amount of money to educate children, which is very expensive in the USA. The millionth prize means, in particular, that one more concern is less. I hope that the children will come to the University of Helsinki or Aalto University (laughter in the hall) and we want to spend any money on education (laughter in the hall) and in this case I will not be able to spend money on whores and cocaine or anything else ... (laughter in the hall) Ok, you still shouldn't have ... (smiling at the camera shows a “cut” gesture)

Professor:
It’s already gone, it’s already gone ...(Linus laughs)

Linus:
But the thing is, the money is there, so I don't need to worry about that. Not that I was so worried about money before. I'm fine.

Question from the audience:
Thank you for being here, Linus. I have two questions, one that is slightly wider and one specific. One is, I would like to know your personal feelings about personal computers in the future, say, in 5-10 years and you agree with Steve Jobs, who said that these would be “trucks and cars”, with such a concept? And my particular question relates to the integration of operating systems. How important is it to have a single OS between PCs, tablets and other form factors? Thank.

Linus:
Ok, a question about technology over the next 5-10 years. I really don't care. I think technology is interesting, but I think that technology is interesting, mainly because it is such a toy that is constantly changing and something new always appears. Therefore, the thing that I’m really interested in on the 5-10 year scale is that we reach physical limits when it comes to cutting processes. I really think it should be very fun and interesting, because it means that the industry should start changing. People who use twice as fast computers or use half the power every 18 months will have to change their approach to work and this should cause changes in the entire industry and I think it should be very exciting and interesting. I do not think,that you will need to choose between "cars" and "trucks", small and large things. I think you will continue to observe this continuum and more ubiquitous things, just computers will be everywhere. And I, in fact, think that it is important to have a system that permeates the entire ecosystem. One of the things we did surprisingly well and I really didn’t believe that we would do that. It is a fact that we can. And Linux is the only kernel that can really work from phones to supercomputers, and it is really the same original foundation. Everyone else did, for example, as Apple apparently did - OS X on the big side and iOS on the small side, and they are not united. Microsoft did the same. We saw that it was a huge advantage to have the same source on the whole spectrum, because it implies that thingsthat are used in the mobile space, like power management, and we spent a lot of time on power management for mobile devices, they are applicable where you go to any other platform, like a server room, which are built in the world today. And the use of food, if not number one, then number two of those things that people worry about. And about such things 5-10 years ago, people did not even think much about it, some people, yes, but it was not universally accepted. And having a common basis means that you get all these different entrances and if you are able to cover the whole spectrum - this is a very powerful technological tool to be flexible. So you can take care of the power on business computers. We did SMP for servers and supercomputers, and on the desktops people were chasing a single processor,on phones, people could not even imagine SMP 10-15 years ago. Today, you can not even buy a phone with a single processor, well, you can, if you buy a phone on Windows.(laughter in the hall) Any modern non-windshield speaker will have 2 or 4 processors. Usually you think that this is important only for one region, but it turns out - no, not only. In fact, it is important for the whole spectrum. Therefore, I think it is also very useful for Linux - how wide the base is.

Prof:
I think this is a great answer, for someone who says that he does not care about the future of IT. It also reminds me of power management, for example, that a third of all these web services in the world work on Linux. And the energy expenditure of these services is astounding. And you can save a few ... well, without building a few nuclear power plants, just by making power management better.

Linus:
I do not know what the situation is in Finland now, but I know that in the United States, when people build large data centers, there is a tendency to build them, for example, close enough to power plants and especially around water tanks, where they can receive cheap energy all year round. It's interesting how important energy management has become for the server business. And it began relatively recently, the last 3 years, and is sometimes the number one cause for concern.

Prof:
I'm here to dig in with my question, what will happen most to Linux in the next 5-10 years? New, big, which is just around the corner?

Linus:
I don't think that way. True. I plan 1 or 2 release cycles ahead of time. Those.for Linux, this means 3 to 6 months ahead. I get access to the early gland, I also get access to people who tell me about their plans for two years. I can't talk about them, but this means that when we make releases and look at the code, many kernel developers do this, we have a window of what will happen in the near future and say, “Ok, this may make sense” or "No, this is a bad idea, because if we start doing it now for two years, it will be wrong." But I do not have a five-year plan. Most of our core work, in fact, is new hardware and new usage scenarios, so we are controlled from the outside, both by hardware manufacturers and companies that use Linux. And this is very interesting, but this does not mean that I am a visionary, I do not like the word "visionary."I do not plan for 5 years ahead, I do not think it works. We are reactionaries, we try to do as well as we can with a fairly short period of time for future plans.

Professor:
Good. Next question. Here.

A question from the audience in very broken English:
Google, Facebook and Samsung pay you insurance bills?

Linus:
My insurance bills? Well no. (laughter)But they, in fact, rather directly pay me a salary. I get paid as an employee of the Linux Foundation, and the Linux Foundation is a non-profit group that is paid for by Google, Intel, Samsung, etc. So they pay me a salary. They pay, for example ... it’s not quite ... although I suppose it can be considered a type of insurance, they also pay the Linux Foundation Legal Department, so if someone is going to sue me or Linux, I don’t have to worry about it directly, there is Legal Department that will intervene. This, in fact, does not happen, why should you judge me, judge big companies that have a lot of money. (laughter in the hall)

A question from the hall in very broken English:
In pursuit.What about your role as a leading Linux developer, what do you think about the future?

Linus:
My role in the development of Linux? It has remained fairly stable over the past few years. We found that this model works very well. We used a release model based on adding features and we used a version-based version control model that did not work very well and had many problems with both. Years later, we found what works and what doesn't. And we have a release model and a control model that seem to scale well. The throughput of the design has, in fact, increased. Therefore, we have more incoming patches, more incoming changes and we maintain a high bar. And it looks like it really works. Who knows, maybe in the next few years there will be some kind of problem, which will mean that we will have to change the model and it is very, very painful.Some of the most painful changes that we have ever made in the core were not related to technology, they were related to how we are developing. But now I do not see anything approaching. Looks like we're doing very well.

A question from the audience in broken Indo-English:
The fact is that I have been using Linux for some time. But I want to get all the real Windows, but this does not happen. The reason, for example, is that I use a certain mobile phone, for which I use some kind of my own application called Keys, which is necessary for managing a mobile phone. But I do not find the equivalent in Linux for this. That's my problem. I return to Windows, for example, to update my phone or to view my contacts.

Linus:
I had a problem. My wife had an iPhone. Jesus, it was a pain for the same reasons - he needed iTunes just to sync everything. She was so happy when I finally bought her a phone on Android and she said: “Hey, I can do everything through the Web, I don’t need to do any synchronization”. It was painful when certain things came with firewood for Windows or applications. What I personally really do not like is the hardware that comes with the firmware updates, and the update program is some kind of dumb Windows program. My home has no windows anywhere. Therefore, I can not update the firmware of iron, which I have. And I say, "Ok, I need to stop ... buy that kind of iron." (laughter)To some extent, Apple helped in this situation, because it turned out that if you are doing applications for Windows only today, Apple is big enough that annoys people. Therefore, now some manufacturers make versions for Windows and for Mac. But other manufacturers simply said, “Hey, we’ll make updates via the Web.” Therefore, the fact that Windows no longer occupies 99% of the desktop market, to some extent also helped Linux to be taken into account. But yes, there are still problem areas.

Replica from the hall in broken Indo-English:
I hope these problems will be solved soon.

Professor:
Another of Screen.IO. You started Linux when you were a student at the University of Helsinki, and I suppose the question was - do you think this is the right time to start a big new project, such as Linux or it would be better to do it in your free time, when you graduate from the university, you have a job, then Do you allocate some other resources for something that you have done? Is this the right time to start Linux?

Linus:
I think so. I had a lot of free time, because studying at the University of Helsinki took me 8 years (laughter in the hall)I do not really study hard. I also think that often enough you have to be a little illiterate in what you do to do something. If you knew more, you would say: "There is too much work here, I will never finish anything here!" When you are a student at university, you can ... hey, you have a choice between "have a beer" and "make something fun with a computer." I did both! (laughter in the audience) And it wasn’t a waste of time, it helped me with my studies, it was interesting. And it would be much harder to do something like Linux when I would have “real work”, and children, and real life. Therefore, I think, at least in the case of Linux, my university years were absolutely the right time to start.

Professor:
Good.There was one of the earlier questions, and this, I believe, is the type of your answer. Of course, the university system is trying to force students to complete their studies in a short time, in 5 years, etc. What is your opinion on this trend?

Linus:
I understand why you think that spending 10 years of your life on drunkenness is not good for society. (laughter) I have to say, I really like the University of Helsinki. And the fact that in eight years of study I received only a master's degree, for me it was a great success. I realize that maybe most people do nothing more productive at the same time. Therefore, it will be a push to make people more effective. I dont know. Enjoy while you can - this is my ... advice. All is well.

Prof:
It's not a bad time to start something big. Following.

A question from the audience with a pronounced Finnish accent:
Hey.Do not tell a little about your home projects or, in a broader sense, in what other areas of kernel development and Git are you involved?

Linus:
And so, the question was about my home projects and other things that I do outside the core. The kernel is my main job, I mean, the kernel is where I use all my time, even if I don’t program, this is what I do day after day. I really have a few projects that I worked on along the way. Git was obviously what I was doing very actively 5 years ago. These days I don’t need to worry much about Git, because Git has great maintenders. I could just say, “Be it as it may, Junio ​​Hamano has been doing an excellent accompaniment work for the last 6+ years.” Therefore, I am no longer involved as much in Git, I sometimes send out a patch, simply because I found something that Git did not do right enough for my use case. Another home project that I have is the Subsurface program. I love divingif I go on vacation, I want to go to where there is warm water and colored fish and corals, and I can dive under the water and scuba dive and it turns out that there is not one good diving application that works under Linux, so I wrote your own. And if there are divers in the audience, my co-maintainer Joe Condell just released version 2.1 Subsurface, today or yesterday, depends on your time. So I have a few other projects that I work on, but these are toy projects, compared to the core.My co-maintainer Joe Condell just released version 2.1 Subsurface, today or yesterday, depends on your time. So I have a few other projects that I work on, but these are toy projects, compared to the core.My co-maintainer Joe Condell just released version 2.1 Subsurface, today or yesterday, depends on your time. So I have a few other projects that I work on, but these are toy projects, compared to the core.

Professor:
I suppose this is the time for the last question. In good company, time flies by. And I will take it from here. And it may sound like “which child is your favorite?”, But I want to ask which part of Linux are you most proud of?

Linus:
There are parts of the kernel with which I am closely connected from a technical angle and I really like, for example, the resolution of path names, I think Linux does it better than anyone else, but at the same time on a large scale, more importantly, we have excellent core community and the fact that we have grown a community from empty to thousands of people involved, I will take part of this merit on myself, it is more important than the code itself that we have a very healthy development community where there are times of “hot” discussions but i think people actually do slave that get a lot of pleasure from the kernel community.

Prof:
Well, I think this is a great moment to end this discussion. And I hope you will join me with big applause for Linus. (hall slams)

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Afterword from the author of translation

Thanks to everyone who stood and read to the end! Perhaps it was worth saying at the beginning, but I am far from a translator and this is my first translation experience. Therefore, do not judge strictly. The text contained many specific terms and designations, as well as names and titles, which I learned only from the conversation. And you know what I tell you? It was terrible! I have to admit that translation by itself, and especially the translation of bad English from voice to text, is hellish torment and really hard work. Of all those present, Linus spoke most adequately in English, which is obvious, although he also periodically littered the speech, the professor followed him, though I also had many complaints about him, well, then just dark. There were also many other factors, such as overlapping laughter, problems with sound, etc., which could affect the accuracy of the translation. Anyway,I hope the conversation with Linus Torvalds was interesting for you and you learned a lot of useful things for yourself. Yes, I almost forgot, you can freely use the translation or any part of it for your own purposes, indicating the authorship and source. Send all comments and suggestions for translation to the PM.

Thanks to Aalto University and Linus! And thank you for reading!